Wind on Fireplug

We skied fireplug this morning. It was quite windy and nearly all snow had some wind effect. The wind nearly knocked us over several times during the tour.  Our search for unconsolidated snow was largely unsuccessful. Near the location on the map, we kicked at several wind loaded test slopes, but saw only minimal failure. In most places we jumped on the wind slab was over a foot thick and would not break despite significant effort or was ~1-4 inches thick and quite brittle. See photo 1 and 2 for examples of this more brittle wind slab that broke easily when kicking above the skin track, but did not crack much beyond our skis. 

We toured over to the gullies on the south side of Mt. Rose and found some sun softened crust on S-SE aspects that skied ok. See photo 3. Pole basket penetration was up to 3 inches. We could see significant amounts of blowing snow on nearly every peak and ridge we looked at.